Buried Memories: My Story: Updated Edition

Derek)

FADED SCARS

MUCH OF IT COMES back to me in vivid, saturated memories: the manila tan of egg-crate soundproofing, the putrid smells of my own waste, and the plastic taste of after-dinner mints that still make me gag. Then there are parts that are hazy, like a foggy south shore morning, and still there are parts I don’t remember at all. Sometimes it even seems it all happened to someone else. But no, it happened to me—I have the hole in my left cheek to prove it. And the cigarette burn on my arm. And the deeper scars no one can see.

I would say that I didn’t really know how bad my situation was until I was out if it. Like getting used to a chilly lake. You tread water and after a while you warm up, even though the water temperature hasn’t changed at all. Looking back, I can feel the icy waters. But then, I didn’t have the means to take the temperature of my environment. I had only two childhood friends. I saw how their lives were. I knew that my life wasn’t like theirs. I was alone, floating face down in a deadly current and didn’t know it.

People would say that I seemed sad. I don’t remember being sad. I don’t recall crying. Except for after the sexual abuse—which started long before I knew the name for it.

I’m trying to regain the memories, but it’s hard to do after blocking them out for so long and trying to forget them. I would block them out and try not to think about them, because if I thought about it, it would happen more. If it was something that was present in my head, if it was something I was thinking about, it could happen again. If I didn’t think about it, maybe I could will it away. But that didn’t work.

John Esposito was always in the picture. My mother, Marilyn Beers, picked up his mother in the taxi she drove. John’s mother started talking about her son, who she said was part of the Big Brothers program. He wasn’t actually a part of the organization, but Marilyn didn’t think to check that out, since John Beers, my half-brother, needed a male figure in his life. We called them Big John and Little John and Marilyn allowed Big John to take Little John off on play-dates to go to the batting cage, to go to his house to play video games, stuff like that.

When I was older, I got to go on the outings too. I liked him. Whenever he would come see me, he would give me a toy—like a Barbie doll—and a big hug.

Big John’s house was a toy store, candy store, and amusement park all in one. He converted his family garage into an apartment. That’s where he lived, and that’s where any kid with a sweet tooth and a video game habit would end up. The downstairs had two garage stalls, and then a door that led into his living room. A little further back was his kitchen and eating area, and a staircase in the kitchen that led upstairs. It was there that all the neighborhood kids would spend hours after school, up the stairs and down the hallway in John’s bedroom. It was a huge open room with a walk-in closet that was wall-to-wall games. Any game imaginable. Board games, toys, Nintendo, Sega.

And then, in one corner, he had a little punching bag hanging from the ceiling. And a basketball hoop. And his room led to yet another room that had ping pong and arcade games lining the walls and another basketball game—this one electronic. Being in those two rooms was any kid’s dream. Not to mention the candy and sweets and soda. I remember he had a little refrigerator in his bedroom always stocked with cans of soda.

Someone told Marilyn that Big John touched Little John in a bad way. So Marilyn said I was no longer allowed to see him or go to his house. But Aunt Linda, my godmother, didn’t go along with that. She had no problem letting me be with Big John. She told me she thought he was a nice man.

December 26, 1992, is one of the heavily saturated days. My memories come back to me in dark reds and black—the colors of Big John’s Nissan pickup truck.

They begin with the knock at the back door of the place in Mastic Beach I was calling home. It was the only door that worked, really. The little tan converted garage apartment was falling apart, and the front door was rotted shut. The back door opened into a dingy kitchen with food-caked dishes stacked in the sink—crusty because no one ever thought to wash them.

In came Ann Butler, Linda’s mother. Ann liked everyone to call her Mom. She drove the half hour from Bay Shore to Mastic Beach because we had no telephone. My real mother, Marilyn, was out of work. Marilyn invited Mom inside. When I came out to say hi, Ann asked me if I wanted to go see Aunt Linda for my tenth birthday, which was in four days.

I really didn’t want to visit with Aunt Linda because I used to be her slave. I cleaned the bathrooms, cooked dinner, vacuumed, and did the laundry. Linda liked to have me around to do all her housework because she was lazy, and later because she didn’t have a left leg. The gangrene got to it because of her diabetes. So she had me to boss around. I couldn’t exactly say no to her demands. Sal, Linda’s husband, was even scarier than she was, and he had ways to make me do whatever he and Linda wanted.

Marilyn instructed me to leave the room. I ducked into the side bedroom that I shared with my mother and grandmother and pressed my ear up against the back of the door, which was so cardboard thin I could hear every word. Marilyn was telling Ann that I was not allowed to visit Aunt Linda because of Sal and Big John. Ann assured her I wouldn’t see Sal or John. Sal, she said, wasn’t living in the house with Aunt Linda anymore, and she promised that Big John would not be there either.

Please, honey, Ann almost begged. Linda has a whole birthday party planned for Katie.

All right, Marilyn finally gave in, but I want her back for her birthday.

Marilyn came into the bedroom and delivered the verdict. I would be going to Aunt Linda’s for a few days to celebrate my birthday, but if Sal was at the house, or if Big John showed up, I was told to call her or the police immediately. I was not allowed to see them. I dutifully headed with Mom to Bay Shore, home of Linda and Sal Inghilleri.

Linda planned a birthday party for the next day and invited her family. The Party is Here! read the giant Mylar sign on the door of the tiny yellow shingled house on Ocean Avenue. I wore a black, floppy Blossom hat because it hid my boy-short hair, which had been lopped off after a stubborn case of head lice got me kicked out of elementary school. Having my waist-long hair chopped bothered me, but I was even more upset that I couldn’t go to school. I knew that lice was something other kids get because my next door neighbor had it and so did some other kids in my class. I tried to sneak to school often, but the teacher would always send me to the nurse to have me re-checked for lice, and when they found them, either Grandma Helen would have to walk to the school to get me or Marilyn would have to come from work. I was praying that the haircut would get the lice out because I wanted desperately to go back to school. It had always been the safest place for me.

So I plopped the floppy hat onto my head, and Linda let me put on a little bit of make-up because it was going to be my tenth birthday—double digits. I told her that since I was going to be ten, I wanted to be called Katherine. Happy Birthday Katherine was scrawled in pink script on the supermarket birthday cake.

Big John dropped off a Barbie Dream House for me. It was my Christmas and Birthday all-in-one. That’s why December birthdays stink. He dropped it off and told me he would come by the next day to put it together. Linda said that was fine and I remember reminding her that I wasn’t allowed to see him.

She said, It’s fine! He’s a nice person. He’s coming!

She then added, We won’t tell Marilyn.

John returned the next day, sat down at the dining room table, and asked Linda if, for my birthday, he could take me to Spaceplex, the giant game arcade in Nesconset about fifteen minutes away. She said, Sure.

I leaned into Linda and whispered that Marilyn made me swear I wouldn’t go anywhere with Big John, and she had told Ann that I was not allowed to. Linda dismissed me with a pointed finger in my face and said emphatically, It’s okay. He’s just taking you to Spaceplex. You’ll be home in a few hours.

I was getting that tight, sick feeling in my stomach—the one I had when Sal would come for me in the middle of the night and do dirty things to me. Marilyn had gotten a restraining order against Sal. But not John. Big John had never touched me.

Big John said that he was going to leave and give me time to get ready, and that he also needed to get ready. I think I was still in my pajamas. Ready for what? I wondered. I thought we were just going to Spaceplex. I put on my black denim skirt, a white turtleneck (one with Scottie dogs all over it), a pair of black cowboy boots, and the ever-present Blossom hat.

Big John was always polite when he would come get me, telling Linda he knew all the rules. Like a date. With the instructions all laid out—mail two letters, phone if late, and home by dinner—we were off.

Big John’s house was a toy store, candy store and amusement park all in one. (Suffolk County Crime Lab)

Big John’s bedroom was filled with junk food, soda and games. It’s where any kid with a sweet tooth and a video game habit would end up. (Suffolk County Crime Lab)

A GIANT

IN ONE OF OUR first meetings, Katie straightened her arm, twisting her elbow to get a better view, scanning the back for the marks she told me she knew were there.

I know it’s here somewhere. I can’t believe it’s faded, so I can’t even find it! she giggled. Well, I’m sure it’s here. Trust me!

Linda, she explained, put out a cigarette on my arm.

Her hands then began exploring her smooth cheeks. There’s a scar here, too, she said, used to be a hole in my cheek.

I remember the police description: White female, straight dirty blonde hair. Small hole in left cheek. It was one of those passed-over details in a news story that never seems to make much sense, but you bury it in the story anyway and privately question its significance.

Linda thought it was a wart, Katie now explained to me. Marilyn thought it was a pimple. Her two mother figures fought over the origin of the facial defect and each had her way with it. Linda burned it off with wart-removing salicylic acid, and Marilyn squeezed it between her plump fingers until it bled. The result was a hole in Katie’s cheek, something she figured she would wear for the rest of her life. But now, as I scoured her face, I couldn’t find a trace of it.

To our meetings, she lugged an overstuffed dark blue vinyl binder. In it were one hundred and eleven double-sided clear archive sleeves, each neatly filled with folded newspaper pages, yellowed clippings, and national magazines, compiled by someone who could obviously foretell the impact of the events and understood that the little waif at the center of the media storm would one day want to remember.

Katie told me her mother had been assembling it for years, and I understood she was not referring to Marilyn Beers. Barbara, her foster mother, had been following the kidnapping in the news and kept every article even before she knew she would end up raising the child who had vanished.

Missing from the binder, though, was the first communication that went out via fax, notifying seventy news agencies from Manhattan to Long Island on December 29, 1992. It declared in the most understated of subject lines: UNUSUAL INCIDENT¹:

The Suffolk County Police Department is asking the public for their assistance in locating Kattie Beers, a nine-year-old Bayshore resident, missing under circumstances evincing an abduction.

Kattie was last seen on Monday, December 28 at approximately 4:30 P.M. at the Spaceplex family Center, Rte 25, Nesconset.

She is a white female, 4 feet tall, 50 pounds, light complexion, brown eyes, with straight dirty blonde hair. She had a small hole in her left cheek from minor surgery. When last seen, Kattie was wearing a dungaree skirt, white shirt with black Scottie dogs, and black boots.

Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of Kattie Beers can contact the Fourth Squad detectives…or the juvenile/missing persons section.

The fax that Tuesday morning ended up in my hands. I was the News 12 Long Island early morning reporter. Some folks dread an early shift, but for me it was essential. It was the only way to live in Manhattan and beat the hour-and-a-half rush-hour traffic to Woodbury, Long Island, where News 12 is based. I could leave my apartment on East 82nd Street at 6:25 a.m., fly across the Queensboro Bridge, thus avoiding a toll which I couldn’t afford on a reporter’s salary, and be in the newsroom by seven sharp. I would show up with a soaking wet head and au natural face. I was working ten-hour shifts with barely a break in the day for the bathroom, so doing my hair and makeup on company time was an ounce of justice.

But on this day, I wished I had come to work ready to roll. The press release handed to me by the assignment editor looked routine enough—a missing child—and I was certain she would turn up quickly. In fact, most stories that involve missing people seem to resolve before the end of the work day, negating all the effort of putting together a news report. The victim usually turns out to be not missing at all, either taken by a family member or friend without permission, or voluntarily off somewhere hoping not to be found.

But this one instantly tripped the radar. Nine-year-old Kattie Beers, it said. Nine-year-olds don’t usually run away from home, no matter how hellish the home.

I also knew there would be competition. A lot of it. All of the New York City stations covered Long Island with satellite news bureaus—in most cases, one reporter assigned to the entire island of nearly three million residents. Suffolk County, home to half of those residents, is a sprawling spread of terrain on the eastern side of the fish-shaped island. Surrounded by water on two shores, Suffolk is the belly and the flat end of the fishtail, and its inhabitants provide no shortage of salacious, scandalous, and at times, wacky news stories. Long Island could always be counted on to provide an interesting array of news choices. With some of the nation’s most expensive zip codes, there are also pockets of the population that can barely pay inflated metropolitan-area rents and mortgages.

Bay Shore, the missing girl’s hometown, according to the police release, fell somewhere in the middle. Its history reads like much of the Island’s: wealthy city families had flocked to expansive beaches to build seaside mansions. Decades later, working class families from the boroughs also came east, buying their first homes here, turning farmland into suburbia.

Harvey Milk had graduated from Bay Shore High. Joe Namath had a summer spread, and the Entenmann family baked millions of boxes of beloved crumb coffee cake here. Bay Shore made news for less celebrated reasons, too: the shuttering of Main Street stores after malls invaded, and the exodus of homeowners after a flood of psychiatric patients were released from Pilgrim State Hospital.

For the most part, though, folks here took care of their kids and didn’t lose track of them.

The Long Island story of the day was often the source of heated morning debate. On any given day, there could be a dozen options. The pile of overnight faxes with story pitches and breaking news could be an inch thick. With each one garnering a few seconds of perusal, the pile was then whittled down to the top ten or so. News judgment varies, but often the collective decision boiled down to balance. Too much crime turns viewers off. Too many features put viewers to sleep. Internal newsroom debates often ended with the three network affiliates and several independent TV stations heading off in opposite directions.

But once in a while, the story of the day is indisputable. There is one obvious lede story, editorial slang for the word lead. Such was the case on December 29, 1992. A missing girl in a game arcade was what we call in the news business a giant.

There was no hesitation. I knew the stations and live trucks would descend upon Bay Shore to seek out the girl’s parents and neighbors, teachers and friends—and I also knew the early bird catches the worm. You snooze you lose—worn-out clichés in news because they are true. I needed to get going fast.

Tony Mazza was already geared up, sitting in the Crown Victoria in the parking lot behind News 12’s studios. Tony, a cameraman, was always upbeat, never grumpy, a rarity in the business, especially at that hour. But first thing in the morning, we rarely exchanged much conversation. I gave him the address: 1083 Ocean Avenue, Bay Shore, and knew I had a good thirty minutes of shut-eye while he looked it up in the Hagstrom’s and silently headed east.

We pulled up to a small house on the right side of a street without sidewalks. We weren’t the first news vehicle to park, and that set off the adrenaline. Dingy yellow shingles framed a wooden front door with a big sign that read, The Party’s Here!

Inside was what we call one stop shopping. The missing girl’s mother, a godmother, a grandmother, and the cops. I could, temporarily, relax. Everyone important to the story was present in the tiny cape, or so I thought.

Suffolk police detectives were swarming around the kitchen area. Marilyn Beers, who I quickly learned was the missing girl’s mother, was standing and smoking next to a red princess phone that hung from the kitchen wall. One of the detectives asked Marilyn if the tape was real. What tape? I listened hard.

Yeah, it’s real. Marilyn showed little emotion. I’m going crazy, she told a reporter. Every time the phone rings, we all jump.

Marilyn explained to the growing gathering of reporters in the cramped kitchen that she got wind of the situation after a phone call to her next-door neighbor from Linda Inghilleri, her daughter’s godmother.

She went with John Esposito after I specifically told her she was not to go with John, Marilyn fumed.

Marilyn explained that Linda had played a tape from her answering machine over the phone, and she had no doubt it was authentic. Katie was crying hard and it certainly didn’t sound to her as if she was playing games. Marilyn had jumped in a friend’s car—her car was dead in the driveway—and rushed to West Bay Shore, twenty-five miles west of Mastic Beach, where she said she lived.

Linda, who explained she was like a mother to Katie, wore a housecoat and a hint of pink pearl lipstick. But there was nothing to conceal the dark circles under her markedly wide-set eyes on a strikingly flat face. She said she was thirty-eight years old, but life had taken more of a toll on her than that number of years could possibly have.

She sat in a wheelchair at the kitchen table, chain-smoking as the song A Whole New World played on a tape recorder. The sweet lyrics wafted above the heavy, smoke-filled air emanating from the overflowing ashtray.

Katie, she said, was looking forward to going with a family friend to pick out a birthday present and then to a game arcade, but the outing turned into a tragedy.

Have you heard from her?

She called me at a quarter after five on my answering machine and by the time I picked it up she had hung up, and I replayed the message, and the message said she was kidnapped by a man with a knife and here he comes. She was crying hysterical. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had to play it back ten more times to make it sure it was real, Linda confided.

‘Please,’ Katie had said, ‘I’ve been kidnapped by a man with a knife. Oh, my God. He’s coming back!’

Who is this John Esposito, the man Katie was with?

He was a big brother to a lot of children for mothers—that’s how they raised their kids—alone. He was trusted by a lot of mothers. He told me that he just turned his back for a second to buy tokens, and she was gone. He had her coat and hat but that was the last he saw of her.

I soon learned this was Linda’s house, but Katie had a bedroom here. It was a cheerful little room with 101 Dalmatian bedding and a Little Mermaid nightgown folded on the bed. Linda wheeled herself out from behind the table and gestured to the doorway, inviting us to videotape whatever we wanted in the bedroom. It was now clear why she couldn’t walk. She was missing a leg.

Diabetes, she said, noticing my glance. God-dammed diabetes.

Marilyn was fielding questions in another part of the cramped kitchen, standing so close to an artificial counter-top Christmas tree that I was concerned her cigarette would spark a fire.

She’s smart, she’s friendly, but she knows not to speak to strangers. She was brought up that way, Marilyn said, exposing a missing tooth on the bottom. I don’t know what else, she shook her head, I just know I want my daughter back. Her eyes welled up.

Is it normal that she would call Linda if she needed help?

The first person she would call is Linda, that’s her godmother. She calls her ‘Aunt Linda.’ Next she would call her grandmother. I don’t have a phone, so she would call my next-door neighbor who would get me the message immediately.

What would you say to whoever has Katie?

Please bring my daughter back. I just want my daughter back. She clenched her eyes shut and a few tears rolled down her ample cheeks.

Ann Butler, Linda’s mother, looked ashen as she held one trembling hand to her temple and stared down at the kitchen table, hiding watery red eyes behind thick bifocals. Her nails were adorned with ancient chipped polish, but her lips sported a fresh coat of matte bubblegum pink for the television interview.

Katie went with Big John, who picked her up, because tomorrow’s her birthday, so he picked her up to take her to Toys ‘R’ Us, Ann said without a breath, and then he took her to this place over in Nesconset, and that’s where everything happened. Katie likes video games and all that. She’s a very happy, content little girl, she said, showing the gathered reporters who were crouching and crowding around the kitchen table a picture taken just days earlier on Saturday.

In it, Katie sported a rascally smirk with her arms wrapped around Ann’s neck, and their cheeks were pressed together. In the picture, Ann beamed, a proud grand-godmother, a far cry from the visibly shaken woman now sitting before us in the kitchen.

When she made that phone call, she was hysterical. She was crying, ‘A man kidnapped me and he has a knife’ and she says—‘Oh my God, here he comes’—and she’s hysterical crying and then the phone just went dead and that’s it—that’s the last anybody’s heard of her.

Ann was stoic. She stared down. Her fingers did not leave her temple. Reporters asked her if Katie was a smart little girl.

Yeah, she sure is, she said, raising her brown penciled-in eyebrows, her first sign of expression in the exchange. John just said he went to get tokens and he just turned around and she was gone.

She bit her upper lip and pressed her fingertips deeper into her temple. The phone rang and it was Katie on the phone and about twenty minutes later, Big John had called and he said he couldn’t find her and he was crying on the phone. He said he couldn’t find her and I had spoken to him a second or two. I don’t know. All we want to do is know she is all right and have her come back. Ann shook her head and finally put down her trembling hand.

Do you have any indication of where she is?

Evidently, she said, "it has to be someone she doesn’t know. To say ‘a man…’" She shook her head again, her trembling hand back on her forehead.

And then, in response to a reporter’s question about what message she had for the public, Ann looked up from the overflowing ashtray filled with Basic Full Flavor cigarette butts smoked down to the tan filters and looked square into the camera lenses.

My message would be please, please get in touch with Linda. Linda is very upset; the whole family is very upset. Linda is in a wheelchair, so she can’t go running looking for her, so if anyone sees her, please call. That’s all I can say, she ended, burying her head in her hand, covering the tears that dropped into the ashtray.

Police, meanwhile, told reporters they were following two trails. There were two men in Katie’s life, and both of them were possible suspects.² They wouldn’t say that publicly, but they didn’t have to because attorneys for the two men eagerly informed inquiring reporters.

Facts started to come in from the assignment desk and my ever- buzzing beeper. Sal Inghilleri, the godmother’s husband, was already facing first degree sexual abuse charges involving Katie after Marilyn had reported him to police. He had been arrested two months earlier and was due to appear in court in February. In fact, there was a court order forbidding him from coming in contact with Katie, which he had apparently violated just being in the Bay Shore house with Katie. With the child now missing, the cops have an idea that it may be him, Sidney Siben, Inghilleri’s lawyer, volunteered to reporters.

At the same time, Siben’s law firm had also just been retained by a new client: John Esposito. The forty-three-year-old contractor had called them that morning, exhausted, saying he needed a lawyer after fielding eighteen hours³ of police interrogation.

The case was assigned to the senior Siben’s much younger nephew, Andrew. Police, the younger Siben told reporters, tried to convince [Esposito] that he was the one who did it. The cast of characters was growing.

To the throngs of reporters now camped both inside and outside the Inghilleri’s Bay Shore cape, it certainly appeared as if police believed Katie had actually been kidnapped. This was no runaway. Public information officers revealed that police operators were receiving a steady stream of Katie sightings, and uniformed cops and canine units were searching the woods and trash bins surrounding Spaceplex. Eyes were fixed on the frozen ground, scanning for discarded clothing, or worse, a body.

The FBI, which had an agent assigned to the case almost immediately, quickly analyzed the answering machine tape and determined that the voice on the phone was, in fact, Katie’s.

At this point everyone seemed cagey, and no one seemed authentically sincere. There were cigarette butts everywhere and the house air was stale and heavy, almost unbearable. Marilyn was sniffling with her eyes closed, and tears were flowing freely.

Outside, on the front stoop, a heavyset, stocky man was taking long, hard drags on his cigarette, blowing puffs of smoke high up above his head. I’m Sal, he greeted me, raising his bushy salt and pepper eyebrows.

I stopped, got a good look at him, and tried to size him up. He smiled at me, and I thought to myself, did this guy just kill a child? Couldn’t be.

What do you think happened to Katie, Sal?

I don’t know nothin’. Who could hurt a little girl?

I headed to the car and gave Tony the nonverbal universal sign—the head tilt which meant to any good cameraman, roll. He fixed his lens on Sal and got images of him kicking a black cat out of the way, and then stamping out a butt on the front stoop.

Our final stop of the day was the nearby home of John Esposito. We shot video of his house at 1416 Saxon Avenue and could see a man with a baseball cap and dark sideburns lead detectives through a stockade fence at the end of the driveway. He scampered to close the gate quickly. As it slammed shut, I could see the sign on the outside of the fence. Beware of Dog. The man with the baseball cap was Esposito. There was no sign of a dog.

THE HOLE

IT WAS AS THOUGH I was on a date with Big John. He let me ride in the front seat of his Nissan pickup, like a girlfriend. I didn’t even have to buckle up. Sometimes he would let me sit on his lap and I would do the steering all by myself.

Anywhere you want to go? John asked.

7-Eleven, I answered and minutes later I had a cola-flavored Slurpee in hand.

I didn’t really get nervous until after we left the 7-Eleven. John told me that he wanted to go to Toys R Us to pick up a Nintendo game, too, and the Toys R Us is completely out of the way from Spaceplex and right around the corner from his house.

I reminded him that he had already bought me a birthday present and said that I didn’t want a Nintendo game and only wanted to go to Spaceplex, but he insisted.

We are going to Toys ‘R’ Us first.

Okay, I finally gave in, but added, "then we’ll